Discourse on Metaphysics
1686 · 84 pages
Leibniz answers Descartes and Spinoza with a universe of self-contained substances, each carrying its whole history and future inside its own concept and mirroring the world from where it stands.
★ 6.3
The Books canon
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Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Foundation
1951 · 320 pages
Hari Seldon predicts the Galactic Empire's fall and thirty thousand years of darkness, then founds a colony to cut the wait to one thousand. Paul Krugman went into economics wanting Seldon's job.
★ 6.5
Early Greek Philosophy
Various and Jonathan Barnes
500 BC · 282 pages
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Parmenides said nothing changes at all. Before Socrates, Greek thinkers asked what the world is made of and answered without appeal to gods.
★ 6.9
Discourse on Method
1637 · 207 pages
Good sense is the most equally distributed thing in the world, Descartes begins, then shows how to use it: doubt all you can, divide each problem, and rebuild only on what survives.
★ 7.1
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
1785 · 130 pages
Nothing is good except a good will. From that Kant derives two commands: act only on a principle you could will everyone to follow, and treat persons as ends, never merely as means.
★ 7.1
Critique of Practical Reason
1788 · 224 pages
You know you ought to do what you would rather not, and Kant takes that as proof you are free. Freedom, God, and immortality return as what practical reason must assume.
★ 7.1
Ethics
1667 · 208 pages
Spinoza proves, in numbered propositions, that God and nature are one substance and that everything follows from it as necessarily as a theorem. Freedom is understanding that necessity, not escaping it.
★ 7.4
Meditations on First Philosophy
1641 · 59 pages
Descartes sits by a fire and doubts everything, down to whether a demon feeds him the world. What survives is the thinking, and philosophy has argued from there ever since.
★ 7.5
Critique of Judgment
1790 · 448 pages
Beauty sits in no object, yet you expect everyone to agree with you. Kant grounds that strange demand, and shows why a raging ocean enlarges the person watching it rather than crushing him.
★ 7.5
Critique of Pure Reason
1781 · 784 pages
Western thought divides at this book. Kant argues that space, time, and cause belong to the mind doing the looking rather than to the world, and marks the boundary reason cannot cross.
★ 8.8